Some Ethical Concerns

Some Ethical Concerns

There were multiple ways that ocap could benefit from this book, but the group also took a risk in participating. I could do a “hatchet job” on the organization and/or make it vulnerable to political attack. I worked with a committee of five ocap members to help me navigate any issues that arose, to support me through my return to working as an ocap Organizer and to attend to any ethical concerns that the organization had. We agreed that I would not report on general membership or executive committee meetings to ensure that members felt they could speak freely. ocap’s existing policy regarding members speaking and publishing about ocap was also adopted in my case. There are a number of texts, both scholarly and non, that claim to be written by ocap members but are written by people who in fact haven’t been a part of ocap for years or never really were an active part of the organization. Those texts carry an undeserved authority by using our name. Consequently, if one intends to speak on behalf of ocap, it has to be approved (the act, not the content) and if one wants to publish about ocap as a member of ocap, they have to run the text by the organization. In my case, the Research Steering Committee took on this role and it was agreed that text approval would be limited to a “no harm” provision. I also agreed that I would work to make all of my talks open to ocap members and any published text available to ocap for free.

The issue of control is important for research on social movement organizations, as academic research has a history of being exploitative and appropriative of activist and movement knowledge.18 ocap has experienced this kind of exploitation and appropriation. Indeed, I personally have felt manipulated by researchers who then appropriated my knowledge about the organization. I wanted to be extra cautious not to subject to this form of epistemological injustice the people that I work with for social justice — I did not want to commit knowledge theft.19

Consequently, in ensuring that ocap could maintain control over the research for this book and that it could take the risk in participating, I proposed that I would not present anything in writing that caused harm to ocap (as opposed to critique). As a longstanding and committed member of the organization, I undertook the research to understand more about how power works and how to make our work more effective. I also wanted to show the minutia of our work so that others could learn from it, not just the “flash in the pan” big actions. I certainly didn’t want to do damage to ocap.